Tag: Thunderstone: Starter Set

How often has this happened to you? You are peacefully tending to your farm, and suddenly a hole in the ground opens up and monsters come streaming out. Next you know, a bunch of heroes are charging you a ridiculous fee to take care of the problem and then make off with the monsters’ treasures as well. Being a Villager in Thunderstone is little fun. But you, you’re one of those heroes.

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I imagine that sometimes the pitch for a new board game must sound a lot like the pitch for the weird blockbuster movie of a year. “It’s a Patience game, only you can play it with friends and it’s about rescuing people from the Titanic.” It probably wasn’t an easy sale, but here it is: SOS Titanic, the multiplayer solitaire game with superpowers.

In a city where the law is nothing but letters in a book, where not only city hall but even the police itself are under the control of rivaling gangs, in a city where everyone with a bit of importance is wearing a fedora – that’s where you play Mafia City.

Evolution is one of the more vicious card games out there – eating your opponents animals is a great survival strategy. But the game’s author is a biologist by trade, so at least it is scientifically acurate viciousness.

You didn’t get your Hogwarts letter, did you? Yeah, me neither. I heard good things about the Elementary College, though. They have the Book of Madness in the library. Yes, THE Book of Madness. I have heard really, really bad things about their health and safety procedures, but they teach their students how to really work together and deal with a crisis. I’ll apply there right now!

The right combination of two familiar game mechanics can create something new and fun. Sea of Clouds combines a drafting game with a press-your-luck mechanic. If you enjoy only one of those, then this game is definitely worth your time because it combines the best parts of them. And it does that while letting you loot the skies as a flying pirate, if you needed any more convincing.

The problems with building pyramids don’t start with stacking big stones on top of other big stones. Sure, that’s one problem, but when you get to that point you solved a couple of other things already. Like how to get big stones when all you see around is sand. That part of the operation is the focus of Phil Walker-Harding’s Imhotep: get stones from the quarries down the Nile and to the construction sites, on ships you have to share with other architects working on the same project.

In Roboburg, the robotic inhabitants work every day of the year, without vacations, without weekends. Except for six days every year when the robo fair comes to town. Then all the robots go and have fun on the fair rides. There’s a lot of money to be made for you as a fair owner, that’s for sure. If you can just attract the right crowd.

Combining boardgames with mobile apps into a game that people actually want to play is the current Philosophers’ Stone and Holy Grail rolled into one for game designers and publishers. The Philosophers’ Grail, maybe. Previous attempts have had lukewarm success at best. But Alchemists is the first in a new wave of games with companion app, and it might just have found the magic formula how do it right.